Free Outline: A Novel by Rachel Cusk Page B

much detail it gathers to itself, so that nothing remains untouched by it. They were struggling to free themselves from one another, yet the very last thing they could do was leave one another alone. They fought over everything, disputed ownership of the most inconsequential item, were enraged by the merest nuance of speech, and when finally they were maddened by detail they erupted into physical violence, hitting and scratching one another; which of course returned them to the madness of detail again, because physical violence entails the long-drawn-out processes of justice and the law. The story of who had done what to whom had to be told, and the matters of guilt and punishment established, though this never satisfied them either; in fact it made things worse, because it seemed to promise a resolution that never came. The more its intricacies were specified, the bigger and realer their argument grew. Each of them wanted more than anything to be declared right, and the other wrong, but it was impossible to assign blame entirely to either of them. And I realised eventually, I said, that it could never be resolved, not so long as the aim was to establish the truth, for there was no single truth any more, that was the point. There was no longer a shared vision, a shared reality even. Each of them saw things now solely from his own perspective: there was only point of view.
    My neighbour was silent for a while. Presently he said that in his case his children had been his mainstay, through all the ups and downs of his marital career. He had always felt himself to be a good father: he supposed, in fact, that he had been more able to love his children and feel loved by them in return than he had their various mothers. But his own mother had once said to him, in the period after his first marriage had ended when he was deeply concerned about the effect the divorce was having on the children, that family life was bittersweet no matter what you did. If it wasn’t divorce it would be something else, she said. There was no such thing as an unblemished childhood, though people will do everything they can to convince you otherwise. There was no such thing as a life without pain. And as for divorce, even if you lived like a saint you would still experience all the same losses, however much you tried to explain them away. I could weep just to think that I’ll never see you again as you were at the age of six – I would give anything, she said, to meet that six-year-old one more time. But everything falls away, try as you might to stop it. And for whatever returns to you, be grateful. So he has tried to be grateful, even for his son, who has failed so spectacularly to survive out in the world. His son had become, like so many vulnerable people, obsessed with animals, and my neighbour had involved himself in more headaches than he could possibly recount by giving in to the unceasing requests that this or that helpless creature be rescued and given a home. Dogs, cats, hedgehogs, birds, even once a baby lamb half-killed by a fox, into whose mouth my neighbour had sat up a whole night spooning warm milk. During that vigil, he said, he had willed the lamb to live, not especially for its own sake but for the affirmation this would have provided of the lonely route he had chosen in relation to his son, which was to treat him with the utmost sensitivity and indulgence. Had the lamb lived, it might have constituted a kind of approval – if only from the universe – of my neighbour’s decision to act in direct contradiction to the boy’s mother, who would have abandoned him to a mental hospital. But of course he found himself burying the thing the next morning, while Takis was still asleep; and this was just one of countless incidents whereby he had come to feel foolish for deciding to treat the child without resort to cruelty. It seems, he said, that the universe favours those like his ex-wife, who disown that which reflects badly on them;